Hit Single
by Petronia
Summary: (To quote Antinostalgic's Avarice, whose blurb was far superior to anything I could think of:) Nittle Grasper are making their comeback, but they're missing something important. Like new songs. Touma finds it's a lot harder than it used to be.


Hit Single

The problem with comebacks in the entertainment industry:  
  
One generally was expected to come back with _something._  
  
All the other elements necessary to their success had fallen into place. Ryuuichi had declined to renew his contract with his American label, and had accordingly been released. Nittle Grasper's core fanbase held unwavering in their devotion, by their own account and that of the back-catalogue orders. The entirety of N-G Productions' sleek star-making machine awaited Seguchi Touma's word, engine purring, ready to roar into motion behind what shaped up to be the company's flagship act. If sales were to prove below-par, brand recognition would certainly not be the stumbling block.  
  
It remained, Touma thought, that they had to have something to sell. The reunion had been a surprise decision by his standards. Ryuuichi had summoned, and they had answered. There was no question of leverage. He believed that the timing was right, but they couldn't dawdle very long on the press release, and all the momentum of the announcement would be lost if it were followed by six months to a year of album recording. So there would have to be a single first. Something catchy and driven, that would impact on the Oricon and win back the fans. Something that would have their old sound, but updated to reflect the new Top-40 paradigm. Something... something _very_ Nittle Grasper.  
  
Which meant one of them had to write it.  
  
"Now you're worrying," Noriko said. Teasing. The two of them had arranged to meet over antipasti and a bottle of fine Italian red, in order to hammer out the contractual details. It was to be a consensus, of course, but Ryuuichi had neither interest nor aptitude for this aspect of their career. "Second thoughts?"  
  
Touma shook his head. "The single--"  
  
"Oh." Noriko nibbled on a strip of zucchini tempura. "The single."  
  
"I've been thinking that I should write it."  
  
"It's Ryuuichi's idea, you know. I'm sure he has something in mind already."  
  
"I'm sure he has."  
  
"But you're the consistent genius." Noriko batted her lashes at him, and Touma had to smile. "And you want to make a splash."   
  
"There's not much of a point otherwise," he said.  
  
"Of course not. If we're going to play, we play to win. We're running on a tight schedule, aren't we, Mr. President? Take the market by surprise - blitz of radio shows, TV appearances--"  
  
"To sustain mass interest." They had done this before. "At least one live performance within a week of the press conference--"  
  
"Of course. When _is_ the press conference?"  
  
The longer they waited, the more chance there was of the news leaking. At this point, even Touma's close subordinates had no idea. "The sixteenth."  
  
"And that gives us two weeks. Two and a half, really, if you count up until rehearsals. I've seen you produce an album in two and a half weeks, Mr. President." A well-remembered light shone in Noriko's eyes. "And Ryuuichi and I need half a day to learn the song. We haven't got a thing, have we? Everything from scratch, nothing but a dream and a rush job. And ourselves. It really is just like the old days."  
  
"Well," Touma said wrily, "at least we're not struggling to get signed." Noriko laughed, a long and merry peal.  
  
"True! Well, that deserves a toast, Seguchi Touma." Noriko lifted her glass, the ruby liquid glowing as it caught the light. "To Nittle Grasper - the new edition."  
  
Touma lifted his own glass. "Nittle Grasper," he echoed, his mind already running through the schedule for the days ahead. He had to visit Eiri in his new apartment the next morning, before everything else: bring a gift, make sure everything was all right. Eiri never communicated voluntarily with anyone if he could help it, but Touma knew he was glad to have an old friend beat down his door every once in a while. He had to be.  
  
Despite himself, he thought of the boy as well. Shindou Shuuichi: a shock of pink hair, a pair of determined eyes, and a _voice._ He had that blazing stage-spark, novel and familiar at once to Touma, who dj'ed every performance at Ryuuichi's side. Less prepossessing out of the spotlight, but…  
  
But.  
  
Employee. Protégé. And rival.  
  
In more than one way, now.   
  
***  
  
He did, indeed, visit Eiri the next morning.  
  
And then the two weeks were extended to three weeks, because another press conference had to be held first. An emergency, of sorts.  
  
Settling the matter of ASK's cessation-of-activity took the better part of three days, with legal advice and attendant demands made on Touma's schedule. It wasn't until the Thursday of that week that his desk was clean enough to warrant spending an afternoon between piano, synthesizers and mixing board, casting for inspiration in the aimless waters of experimentation. Thursday afternoon turned into Friday, then the better part of a Saturday in his well-soundproofed home studio. Then, after cancelling a social appointment or two on his and Mika's joint calendar, a Sunday.  
  
Not until Monday did it occur to Touma that he might be in trouble.  
  
It wasn't the pressure. Touma was a workaholic and knew it. Another artist could easily have been brought down by the tight schedule alone, but Touma thrived on disciplined challenges, and demanded more of himself than he ever would of others. Here was time he had set aside for himself in order to create; it was important, even imperative that he produce. He should have been overflowing with ideas. And he had nothing.  
  
It baffled him, quietly. There was never – nothing. It seemed to him normally that he never set foot in the studio but there was something to do, a bass line to polish up or a bridge to rework, a host of samples and riffs and melodic fragments waiting to fall into place, guided by his deft touch on synth keys or sequencer buttons. Certainties had abandoned him often enough in life, but from his first basic piano composition on (and that had been early enough in life that he barely remembered it), he had always been able to tap into the songs.  
  
He was good at it. He knew the form, and the inner workings. There was always a centre to these things; a musical thesis, as it were.  
  
A hook.  
  
All he had to do was find it. The rest would come.  
  
On Tuesday he thought he had it.  
  
He worked on it, encouraged, for several hours, refining and expanding the original theme. He programmed a drum loop, the fundamentals of a bass line, ran through what he had a couple of times and called it a session. He would sleep on it, he told himself, come back the next day and start thinking about lyrics. That would be the time to bring in the other band members on the project as well: they were better at fitting words to music than he was, especially Ryuuichi, for all that he was a hopeless dyslexic when confronted with written text beyond his three phonetic alphabets.  
  
So he checked in at the office early the next morning, made sure nothing pressing had cropped up that needed his personal attention, and was back in the studio by nine. That was Wednesday.  
  
By nine-thirty he knew it wasn't working.  
  
Sleeping on it did wonders for one's perception. What had seemed promising the day before was merely mediocre to the rested ear. The song wasn't bad, exactly – it wouldn't sound remiss coming midway through an album, if Touma took some pains with the production – but there was nothing inspired about the melody. It didn't tug at the listener to pay attention. The chorus was worse than the verses, because it was patterned almost exactly on that of "Nikkou", from off the _Devolution_ album. Touma couldn't believe he hadn't picked up on the resemblance at once. "Nikkou" had been their seventh single; it was a better song. This one just sounded tired.  
  
He shut off the tape with a vicious punch of the button, and got up for a walk. There was only one other recording session going on that morning, one of N-G's girl idol groups working on their major-label debut behind closed doors. Touma met no one in the corridors, which was probably just as well: he felt too frayed to smile, and not as confident as he liked to appear. He passed the vending machines by the elevators, debated getting himself a coffee, decided against it, turned down the left-hand corridor on a whim and found himself walking past the dance studios. All of them were unoccupied as well. His footsteps echoed dully on the vinyl flooring.  
  
The walk ended, as such walks tend to do, in an empty room with a piano.  
  
The first thing Touma noticed when he pushed the door at the far end of the corridor was the sunlight. It nearly blinded him, streaming in from the uncurtained windows in the opposite wall, and a skylight in the ceiling. Some virtuosity of the architect, in crafting a lightwell here: the recording studios occupied the centre of the building, and there were four more stories above. The room had been built for dance practice as well, judging from the blond hardwood parquetry, and the handrails running along three walls. Dust motes danced in the golden haze. There was no furniture or stored equipment, apart from the instrument in the centre of the floor.  
  
It was a Yamaha, neither concert nor upright, but a cream-coloured baby grand. The keyboard's cover was unlocked, but it had obviously been in disuse for some time. Touma sat, not bothering to adjust the bench or brush at the seat. He played a few bars of Bach, then a full set of scales, one end of the keyboard to the other and back. One of the top notes was stuck, and the F below middle C rang flat. Touma frowned, and made a mental note to have a tuner come in for all the pianos in the building. A few days of damp, a pattern of overuse… That was one of the reasons he had turned increasingly to electronica: programmed instruments weren't fallible in quite the same way. Sample or input at such a such a frequency, and the note was preserved as a platonic ideal of itself, the pattern of harmonics unfalteringly beautiful. Loop it, distort it, and the computer banks remembered; it did what you wanted, no less and no more.  
  
Perfection.  
  
But that was only half the equation, wasn't it?  
  
Let your vocalist cry himself out of voice over a love affair, or catch a congested chill or eat too much curry before the live, and see where all the digital recordings in the world get you.  
  
Touma pressed the back of a hand against his forehead, feeling suddenly weary. Eiri - he was worried for Eiri. The conversation they'd had earlier in the week weighed on his insides like a stone he'd swallowed. He'd tried so hard to limit the damage, to erase the pain and replace it with music of his own devising. As long as Eiri was happy… But the past had a way of seeping through the surface-perfect polish of the present, like the ghostly murmurs on a recycled audio cassette. Eiri was coming apart, coming adrift, and anything Touma could do was already damage control. Just like before.  
  
He wanted to blame it on Shindou. But even that was denied him: Eiri had told him of his own free will. Touma felt the revelation as a betrayal, though he knew he had no right. It had never been his secret.  
  
But he had kept it as well as his own, Touma thought, letting his fingers trail over the keys. Too well, in a certain sense... They had been truly close, once. There were songs he had played for Eiri, on the near-antique upright in their twentieth-floor Manhattan apartment, a block down from the Metropolitan Opera House: mere snippets of things, wordless. Some of them had never left that room. (Pressing down on the mock ivory. A chord, then another, trusting to instinct to find the half-remembered notes.) And Eiri had heard them out, and offered to write lyrics to suit in his awkward adolescent metre, and smiled. Mornings in New York survived in Touma's memory as an impressionistic sketch, warm and golden as the sunlight that bathed the practice studio.  
  
And then it had all gone silent.   
  
Shindou was never silent. Shindou had the same tone to his voice that Eiri had had sometimes, when he said that name. _Yuki…_ As if he were singing. Touma found it almost obscene, because it meant Eiri now. And all he'd wanted was for Eiri to forget.  
  
"Forget what?"  
  
Touma started, jerking his hands from the keys in a manner he did not realise was furtive. The music halted on an unresolved chord. "Ryuuichi?"  
  
Ryuuichi stepped forward, letting the door swing closed behind him. The movement put him under the skywell, and the copper highlights hidden in his hair caught the sun, creating an untidy halo around his head. Touma blinked hard, lifted a hand to shade his eyes from the light. He couldn't see Ryuuichi's expression.  
  
"Is it something you left behind, Touma?"  
  
As if he were singing. Touma felt a strange sensation of dislocation, as if he'd fallen asleep in the sun and woken somewhere else. "I—"  
  
"Not your lunch money, is it?" Ryuuichi bounded up to him, throwing himself down on the floor beside the piano bench as if it were the most natural action possible. "You don't have to hide, Touma! I'd spot you, you know - skipping lunch isn't good for your stomach." The toy rabbit was produced, right on cue. "Even Kumagorou knows that."  
  
Touma laughed ruefully, normality re-establishing itself. "I'm sorry, Ryuuichi. I… I suppose I lost track. What time is it?"  
  
"Lunchtime," Ryuuichi said promptly. "What are you working on, Touma? Is it the new song? Noriko said you were working on a new song."  
  
"Yes…" Touma's gaze flickered toward at the piano keys. "No. Not really. I've been finding it a little difficult to get started."  
  
"What were you playing before, then? It was pretty."  
  
Touma stared back at him blankly. "What was I—"  
  
Then he remembered.  
  
He had to take a deep breath. Nothing more.  
  
"It's a sad song, Ryuuichi. We need a happy song, to celebrate the reunion. Something exciting, fast-paced." There was a pause. Ryuuichi tilted his head up at him, his eyes very wide and sea-dusk blue.  
  
"There's no sad songs or happy songs, Touma," he said. "They're all just songs. Aren't they?"  
  
"Ryuuichi—"  
  
"You'll be all right," Ryuuichi said, overriding with arbitrary decisiveness whatever Touma was going to say, and stood. "For sure…" He held Kumagorou out in front of him, wagged the arms up and down. "Touma can do everything! 'Cos he's _cool,_ see?"  
  
Touma smiled. "Perhaps," he said, and wished he believed even that.  
  
***  
  
It came to a head late that night, after he'd gone home. He had locked himself in his private studio again, after a hurried dinner; Mika had been home, and had frowned after him in concern, but had not asked him what the matter was. She knew him well enough to sense when he had issues to resolve alone.  
  
He had turned again to the simple electric piano, his favorite instrument, and tried to recapture… something. Anything. But it felt like scrabbling on the surface of things, with the sinking realisation dawning on him hourly that – somehow – he was going about it wrong.  
  
He needed a single.  
  
It wasn't forthcoming.  
  
What wasn't he seeing?  
  
Touma closed his eyes and straightened, letting his hands fall loose in his lap. How long had it been like this? He had produced a considerable number of N-G artists over the past four years, putting the final radio-friendly veneer on others' creative efforts. Had done it for Nittle Grasper before that. He wrote constantly back then; they all did. It was hard to assign credit in the early days, even, things happened when they jammed together. (A coffee break with the tape left running, Touma allowing his fingers to wander over the Hammond, the same seventh intervals over and over; Noriko picking at a battered acoustic guitar from the depths of the studio couch. And eventually, Ryuuichi's voice joining in to tread out the melody, a hum that brought words in its wake. So natural.) But then they got busier, practices became tightly-scheduled affairs, and other songwriters fell over themselves offering Grasper their best material. Touma had produced the last album. He had, in fact, broken with their former label rather than relinquish a hair of creative control. But that had come nearly a full year before the hiatus, and the last two singles had been Ryuuichi's—  
  
He hadn't really written anything _new_ for a long time, had he?  
  
All the hits from the _Wild House Blue_ era were his. The better part of two albums written over a single six-month period: sun-filtered New York mornings, and an old upright piano in a high-rise apartment.  
  
Nothing since.  
  
Touma laughed, the ring of it hushed by the soundproof walls enclosing him. Oh, they were a matched pair, he and Eiri! Such success stories. Such… such _bankable_ bestsellers. How easy it was to be formulaic and commercially astute, as long as none of one's broken glass ended up in the finished product. As long as one kept safe.  
  
Touma closed the lid of the piano and went for a drive.  
  
***  
  
He ended up at N-G Productions headquarters, as ever. In the lobby he smiled his usual greeting at the night watchman, who was admittedly more used to seeing the president leave in the small hours of the morning than return. "Quiet night, Kogawa-san?"  
  
"As always, sir. Are you going up? Sakuma-san is in the office." Touma started.  
  
"Ryuuichi?"  
  
"Been there for a while, sir. I told him you'd gone home, but he said you'd be coming back tonight. Said you'd left something behind. Sir."  
  
Touma had known Ryuuichi for nigh-on a decade, day in and day out: too long for surprise to take a strong hold. He marked a pause, smiled again. "Well," he said. "I suppose I might have, at that."  
  
***  
  
Ryuuichi was fast asleep when Touma let himself into the office. He lay half-prone on one of the leather divans, Kumagorou tucked securely under his chin, legs hanging carelessly off the edge. He looked like he had sat down to wait, and had slipped sideways. Touma sighed, bent to help him out of his shoes and lifted his feet up onto the cushions. Ryuuichi mumbled something and curled up tighter. He looked comfortable; Touma knew from experience that it was.  
  
He took a blanket from one of the side cabinets and drew it gently over his bandmate's slumbering form.  
  
The spotlight set in the ceiling over his workspace was on, but dialed down to dimness; city lights glittered outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. There was something on his desk. Touma blinked and walked closer.  
  
Two large sheets of crumpled soft paper lay side-by-side on the polished wood, looking suspiciously like – were unfolded paper napkins. They were covered with Ryuuichi's distinctive scrawled kana, in several different hues of what appeared to be Copic pen. Touma could see a blotch where Ryuuichi had attempted a line with a marker that was too new, and the strokes had run together. He had started again with a drier tip that had worked better. Touma shook his head in wonder and picked up the first sheet, sounding out the words.  
  
_"Tookume… tooku me o hikarasete…"_  
  
They were lyrics. He couldn't remember Ryuuichi giving him just lyrics before: it had always been a tape, when not an impromptu and enthusiastic demonstration in the hallway. Touma thought of their conversation in the practice studio, and his eyes narrowed.  
  
_You'll be all right, for sure…  
  
Touma can do everything. 'Cos he's cool, see?_  
  
A challenge? A vote of confidence?  
  
One never knew, with Ryuuichi.  
  
Touma sat, parsing his way through the lyrics slowly. They were… a little unusual, for a love song. Fierce, close to frightening. Or he found them frightening. He had enough sense to know that every woman under thirty in the audience would swoon to hear them delivered from Ryuuichi's lips, midnight-blue gaze flashing as it crossed hers over the floodlights. _Watching intently from afar…_ He drummed his fingers soundlessly on the edge of the desk, looking for the stress pattern.  
  


_You who can be born again, don't smile alone  
I'll put lustre into your eyes  
Though the world you desire turn suddenly to ashes…_

  
  
Pause. Something there, nagging.  
  


_Though the world you desire…_

  
  
Had Ryuuichi played this for him before?  
  


_Though the world…_

  
  
_They're all just songs, aren't they?_  
  
The music came.  
  
Touma sat back hard. The papers slipped from his suddenly nerveless fingers and fluttered to the floor. _He_ had played it for Ryuuichi. In front of him, rather: a scrap of melody surfacing from the subconscious as so often happened, a fragment, a turn of phrase. It would have been unimportant, if there had been no memories to accompany it.  
  
And Ryuuchi, the world-famous Sakuma Ryuuichi, who could sing back any tune he'd caught on the radio once, note for perfectly-pitched note...   
  


_ There's no exit  
If you plan on surviving the impact _

  
  
It was dangerous to write like that. He'd known it, somewhere deep inside, and so he'd stopped. Had discarded that gift in his tracks and not even realised. Nothing that would betray Eiri-   
  
Certainly nothing that would lay himself bare.   
  


_ To the breaking point  
Show me your falsehoods _

  
  
"Who do you mean, Ryuuichi?" Touma whispered, but the darkened expanse of the office swallowed up his voice. The huddled form on the divan didn't stir. And in the silence, unbidden, nearly despite himself, he heard the weave of the music begin: the handful of measures expanding, notes falling into place, turning into something else.   
  
Fast song, slow song, happy or sad. A matter of cranking up the bpm, changing the instrument or the sampled background. He knew how to do it. He did it all the time. All he had to do was find a hook.   
  
Did he think Eiri would hear him, as in that sunny apartment so many years ago? Perhaps he would hear the _song,_ if Shindou played it for him. If it topped the charts, went into heavy rotation on all the popular stations. But the song was only half the equation.   
  
And Eiri was attuned to an entirely different voice.   
  


_ You may still meet with miracles… _

  
  
They were waiting for him to put out a single, in the real world.   
  
Touma stood abruptly. He picked the sheets of paper off the floor and folded them with care, slipping them into an inside pocket of his coat. He paused only a moment before Ryuuichi's divan before letting himself out of the office, as quietly as he'd come in. It would be hours before dawn, and he wanted a head start on his work.   
  
Ryuuichi shifted under the blanket when the door snicked closed, murmuring like a dreaming child, but did not wake. 

_--Montreal, May 2002_

* * *

Notes: 

**1)** In point of fact this fic _wasn't_ written with "Sleepless Beauty" on repeat in the 'amp, but I'm afraid you can't tell. ^^; Two versions thereof are essential enough to the story that I'm putting them up as a permanent download: original and sacred beauty (piano acoustic) mix.  
  

**2)** I was going to dedicate this to Asakura Daisuke - he was the one who actually _wrote_ the "single", after all - but I chickened out of it. XD Touma's an odd composite of Asakura and TK in canon, so I tagged along with the in-jokes. I like to think it reads more lighthearted to fellow fans of bad jpop. 

* * *


End file.
